Within ENVISION, you can create a Distance Decay analysis. Distance Decay is a geographical term which describes the effect of distance on spatial interactions. The Distance Decay shows the distribution of your customers around a location and can be used to help determine whether creating a new custom trade area is warranted for conducting customer analysis. It helps answer the following types of questions:
What percentage of my customers live within 5 miles or kilometers of my store location?
What size should my trade area be for this location, based on where my customers live?
How far do my customers travel to get to my store?
The Distance Decay counts customers within 50 bands around a location. By default, the bands are measured in 1 mile (US) or 1 kilometer (CAD) increments, but that can be changed at either the account or workspace level. You can also set the Distance Decay to be measured in increments of time.
Use WalkMe Through to be taken through a step-by-step of this process in ENVISION itself. Click on the WalkMe Through button below to get started.
To change band measurements:
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In the My Workspaces tab, select the gear icon of the workspace that you are in.
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Click Details.
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Select the Settings button on the top right of the page.
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In the Distance Decay section, specify the Default Area Sizes and Default Drivetime Method. Click the Save changes button once complete.
The Distance Decay can be run on all of your customers or on customers that are associated with a specific location. In order to perform the latter, you must have an ID field in the location file that matches an ID field in your customer file. This field is referred to as Location ID in ENVISION.
Ensure that the Location ID fields in both files contain the same data and are formatted the same way, otherwise, ENVISION will be unable to join the two files together. The Location ID field must be specified for both the customer file and location file when you are importing them for the first time, it cannot be chosen after the initial import. For more information about importing files, please see How do I prepare data for importing files? opens in new window
Inputs Required:
- Customer file
- Single location or series of locations
Note: Without a Location ID, ENVISION will assume that all the customers within the file are associated with all locations. If your customer file does have a Location ID, but your location file does not, the Distance Decay analysis will fail.
To subset your list of customers, you can use a customer filter. For more information on this, please see Creating and Editing Customer Filters opens in new window.
The steps to run a Distance Decay are the same whether you have a Location ID specified or not.
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Click the Distance Decay tool.
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Select the customer file by clicking the box next to its Record Count.
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After selecting your location file from the drop-down, select a location, or more than one location, of interest by clicking the check mark next to it.
These locations will be used as the starting point in the distance measurement for each customer.
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Select a benchmark for the analysis by clicking the check mark next to it.
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Click Create Dashboard.
The Distance Decay results are now available in the Results list in ENVISION. For more information on how to interpret the results, please see our How-to-Read documentation.